Elizabeth Gilbert speaks to fantasies, specifically the 21st century American variety of jet-set enlightenment by way of paradisiacal settings, and reassurance that broken hearts mend to love again. The fantasy is so persuasive that her book has singlehandedly augmented spiritual tourism in Bali.

I thought I was a decent member of the literary community. I read a local writers; I buy books at local bookstores; I go to at least one literary event a week. Then my own novel came out. Mountains crashed; music rang out; and I was flooded with the awareness that I’ve been doing a whole lot wrong.

I have been living in a room in a house perched on a cliff that overlooks the Oregon coast for almost a month. A window with an ocean view spans the width of my desk, but when I sit down to write, I often find myself doing anything but that.

Despite Breakfast of Champions' outraged pessimism, it was quite a lot of fun. I needed more.

I spend a significant amount of time being the crazy dude who came to someone else’s classroom to talk about how poetry is amazing. Right now, I’m the commencement speaker. I promise, in three hours, I’ll be the guy who looks uncomfortable in a tie on the downtown 4 train.

In the past, I’d immediately swap the book I’d just read for a new one, a literary chain-smoker. But now I take my time.

I wrote back and she was quick to respond. It wasn’t long before I began to live my life in order to write it to her in a letter. The events that occurred during the day, occurred so that I could describe them.

Abramović has spoken many times about how her duration pieces have the capacity transform both herself and the viewer. But I also wonder if the interactive and ever-changing nature of the piece influenced the popularity of the performance, which by the end had become a media phenomenon.

Floating through Tetris' cranial hyperspace forces a natural introspection.

Recently two people who wouldn’t seem to have much in common—my 26-year-old brother and my one-year-old son—have both had me thinking about wonder and fear, and how their experiences of those two things are similar to each other’s, and different from my own.

While writers have never stopped writing short forms of fiction, Quattro is to be commended for giving this literary form some formal shape and focus.

Complete with phonies, small things that men love about women, and the mid-1800s equivalent of bathroom graffiti, Middlemarch is a book that I think Holden Caulfield would have grudgingly found acceptable.

It’s fair to characterize the last five hundred years of human civilization as a history of not-getting-the-joke of Utopia.